A CIO Blog with a twist; majority of my peer CIOs talk about the challenges they face with vendors, internal customers, Business folks and when things get through the airwaves, the typical response is "Oh I See". Some of you may disagree with my meanderings and that's okay. It's largely experiential and sometimes a lot of questions

Updated every Monday. Views are personal

Monday, May 27, 2013

The fact that IT
is about business and that IT executives should be adept in business matters
has been written and talked about a gazillion times by everyone who even remotely
has anything to do with IT on this planet. It has been a discussion, debate,
viewpoint, opinion, experience, coaching, mentoring, part of courseware and
curriculum, published by IT media, books dedicated to, researched, pushed down
the CIO and IT throats, for as long as I can remember; with my weak memory indexing
that would be a decade plus.

Neither CIOs nor
IT disagree with this postulation, they are however fed up of repeated ranting
of this party line. It is not that IT folks do not practice this every day when
they are in midst of their business teams or with others. I have observed that
leaving aside a handful, every IT team member has a good view of the business
even if it is narrow view of the function s/he supports. As you move up the
ladder the articulation gets better and the view broader; some good CIOs could
give a discourse about the industry too.

It is fashionable
for most vendors to start discussions with the rhetoric what are your top 3
business priorities and then barely listen to the response. Every consultant or
research report continues to talk about alignment and enabling the business.
The message has remained the same; the words have changed to include the latest
fad or trend – cloud, big data, mobility, security, and social media – as if
these are critical components of business rather than technology.

I don’t know why
but a recent post by a consultant got my goat and I went into my once in a
decade murderous moods wanting to challenge this underling to a duel. What did
he know about the CIO and his/her role when he has never been one ? He only had
advice on what a CIO should be doing to stay relevant, and that included the
usual stuff that is the norm now. After a brief attacking response, I tempered
down to reach the stage we reach when we see a lot of dogs barking; we ignore
them.

Ruminating over
the state of affairs I wondered about the fact that one of the core
competencies of IT is that they understand technology and are able to apply it
to influence business outcomes. If IT did not understand technology, its pros
and cons, the application of technology solutions would be like a game of
roulette; you win some, you lose some. And if IT abdicated this responsibility,
who would validate the efficacy of the solution and that it is being used to
its optimal capacity or value or benefit ?

The technology
team needs to engage the vendors and solution providers on equal terms getting
into deep dives on every technology component as well as the integrated
solution to understand how it will deliver to promise as well as coexist with
the current technology framework and architecture. Things don’t work by chance
when information follows with the material or process to generate goods and
revenue. They have to be made to work with each other by design and that
requires technology skills.

The diversity of
technologies, hardware, software, applications, networking, storage, cloud,
dashboards, analytics, reports and reporting tools, mobile devices, data
management, security, and what have you, each requires extensive effort to
understand how they impact each other and then manage them effectively. I have
yet to sight a person who had expertise in all of them; a team can collectively
represent a potent unbeatable combination which when married with business will
always succeed.

It is a fallacy
to expect the IT team to give away their foundation of technology and embrace
business skills only. To me it would be like choosing either work or life. Life
gives birth to work and work enables a life. Similarly technology innovation
opens new opportunities for business and new opportunities give rise to new
solutions. I believe that a balance has to be found such that the two sides of
the coin give different views to whoever is looking at it without compromising
each other.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Congratulations on your new role ! We would like to
come and meet you to understand your key priorities and challenges. We can help
you in classifying your portfolio of applications, the technology landscape
that you have, or consolidation and rationalization strategy, IT strategy and
roadmap and help you align to the business. For multiple companies we have
helped them optimize their IT operations and save costs. We can move dollars from
BAU to innovation. Can we meet you in the next few days ?

Even if you are
not new to the role, I am sure that all CIOs (at least I do) receive such
messages from all kinds of vendors, consultants, research companies, and what
have you with alarming frequency. They claim to have worked with companies who
are highly successful in their use of IT; they make it appear that these
customers would have remained in a challenged state if they had not come to the
rescue with their frameworks and consulting practices that helped them get out
of mediocrity to become winners.

They are
aggressive in their approach and are willing to go across the layers of the
company to get to you, as if the sky will fall by next week if you did not
engage them. Some of them have retired or ex-CIOs as primary subject matter
experts; most use decade old models as their base which were created by a few
academicians. These frameworks can still be applied with reasonable success to
most company’s IT portfolios throwing up opportunities for improvement or
validating success for a well-run enterprise.

Having known some
of their “subject matter experts” in their past avatars, I have never been too
keen to connect with them with a bit of credibility crisis staring them in the
face. Despite that, surprisingly the number of customers using one or more of
these wonderful companies – who have answers to all the challenges faced by the
CIO – appear to be overpowering with almost every enterprise that I know on the
list. While I knew of some and their reasons, I found it hard to digest.

So I started connected
with some CIO friends to ascertain what were their key drivers ? Did they face
an identity crisis or they developed cold feet in putting forward their
strategy, plan or take risks ? Behind the brave face that they put up in
conferences and meetings, were they a bunch of scared or uncertain individuals
struggling to figure out how to make things work ? I could not accept my own
fears on this hypothesis and gingerly approached the subject lest I create a
self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sigh ! The result
was a mixed bag; in most cases the usage was to get endorsement or a stamp of
approval from an authoritative source for higher credibility to the project or
technology. In some I observed that the organization was risk averse or did not
have the requisite confidence on the IT team and thus sought validation of the
CIO proposals. Global and local research analysts and the models I referred to
earlier give the requisite crutch or platform to the CIO to get endorsement and
alignment.

The more
interesting insight was with a few CIOs who did need the help to get there.
They were bright individuals with technology expertise but limited ability to
create a business case or put across a transformation agenda to the Management
or Board. They were smart enough to work with these companies to find solutions
thereby overcoming their limitations. I stopped applying my filter criteria for
evaluation of the proposed engagements from this plethora of value providers.

Considering there
is indeed a segment that finds value in engaging such companies (which is why
they exist and continue to thrive, demand supply equation you know), my sincere
and humble submission to all the wonderful companies is not to assume that
everyone they talk to has a problem that they are unable to solve. All CIOs are
not equally created, some are bigger Idiots than others, and others believe “I”
stands for Intelligent or Innovation …. I think I was an Idiot for some time,
and that will pass.

Monday, May 13, 2013

By design,
omission or inadvertently, all of us have faced the situation where the vendor
has declared the product “end-of-life”. This puts at risk legacy applications,
instrumentation, automation, or in many cases plain old processes that have
survived all attempts to change them. CIOs and IT realize that upgrades are
expensive and in some case not as good as the earlier working versions in terms
of stability and/or functionality. But then they have to do it lest there be no
support when the software fails.

Many CIOs succumb
to the pressure quickly, only to realize that the deadlines have shifted and
they could have avoided the nasty dialogue with respective functions (normally
finance). They could have saved the unbudgeted expense in the upgrade which
wiped out buffers that were provided for some innovation. Sometimes this leaves
a feeling that this was a ploy to move everyone along reducing the support
costs for the vendor, maybe some incremental licences (new versions typically may
have different breakup).

A CIO friend
bought a software package that fit business requirements so well that it
appeared to have been developed using the requirement specifications of the
company. She loved it as it implied very little customization and a deployment
timeline better than what the business wanted. Everything went like a dream,
the solution went live with celebrations and everyone was happy. The vendor was
acquired by one of the big IT product and services companies; the new CEO
promised to keep old customers happy.

As it was time to
scale up, the CIO approached the new entity for new licences. The offer for
upgrade had her fall off her chair; it was twice of what she paid earlier.
Reaching out to the old team she found no help forthcoming with them citing new
policies of the acquirer. The big guy sales team explained the new investments
into the solution justifying the increase. Left with no choice in the face of
the earlier business success, the CIO felt cornered and frustrated though had
to accept the new terms.

In another
scenario recounted to me some time back, a packaged vendor gave a demonstration
of a specialized solution to the business team who loved what they saw. They
approached the CEO and the CIO with a claim of higher productivity and ROI. The
CEO endorsed the purchase and the IT team got down to creating the project
charter, implementation plan and timeline. Quickly they realized that the
solution required significant customization to work in their environment.

The CIO got
together with the Business Head to provide the reality which was quite
different from the short trailer and demo. Since they shared trust, it was
evident that the solution provider had only revealed the surface; they had
pressed the right buttons and given the messages that created empathy. The
resultant in high expectations created a feeling of being short changed; while there
was no false information, limited revelations created desire and expectations
that were unrealistic.

I could go on and
on with many examples on how every day we face situations which leave us with a
negative gut feeling and a sense of having been taken for a ride. Some of these
are a result of our own naivety, inexperience, or overenthusiasm; also in many
cases due to intentional concealment of facts and/or our interpretation of what
is said. There are rare cases when mal intent has been the driver too; it is
largely taking advantage of the gullibility of the buyer. And every time I hear
of an incident, I feel restless.

I do not believe
for a moment that this situation is unique to the CIO; at times all CXOs face situations
that leave a feeling that we are being taken for a ride, sometimes during the
journey, sometimes after we have been gypped. Is there a solution to this ? I
do not have a silver bullet to resolve such situations; I believe that
tactically the CIO has to work on each case to address the issue at hand. Due
diligence and contracts go some distance, the rest falls into risk zone and have
no easy answer.

Monday, May 06, 2013

When the
phenomenon called Cloud made appearance on the IT landscape, it promised to
disrupt many existing paradigms. You don’t need to buy any server hardware and
storage, capacity is available on demand and you pay for what you use.
Applications with licencing models that can adapt to business cycles,
Everything-As-A-Service (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and many more), no capital
investments, only operating expense. It was touted to be the silver bullet to
solve all the budgeting challenges of the CIO including getting rid of the CIO.

Evolution brought
competition and a hysterical wave that caught every Vendor, System Integrator,
Research Analyst, and the CIO alike. New terms were coined to depict the key
attributes that the cloud promised: agility, flexibility, resilience,
scalability, and on-demand. Alliances of hardware, software and networking
vendors vied for attention; everything was cloud-enabled or ready. When
corporate data centres could not be classified, the term “Private Cloud” came
to rescue.

It brought some
comfort to the CIO that s/he was not seen as “not doing the in thing”; almost
everyone now had a cloud, private or public. From there rose the challenge of
making them work together. After all if some apps are on the public cloud while
the transactional systems or other apps are still in the corporate data center
they need to inter-operate Tools and technology solutions attempted to bridge
the chasm; everyone had a variant that did something better than the other
confusing the heck out of IT teams.

Someone
christened the new reality of the coexistence as “Hybrid Cloud” and the term
has stuck on. For simpler solutions, applications and processes like
collaboration, sales force automation and the likes of Human Capital
Management, the challenge was easily overcome by most. Pervasive challenges of
security, data residue, service levels, interoperability between different
clouds, or difficulty in migrating from one service provider to another, cut
across every offering.

Evolution of the
services and technology has not been uniform; a few still struggle to offer a
consistent experience straddling between the data center and the public cloud. A
CIO narrated a harrowing story of his journey towards making a hybrid cloud
work to offer a consistent and uniform experience to his users. The vendor in
question either due to ignorance or over-enthusiasm promised everything to be
possible and the delivery team struggled to get even the basics working.

Step by step
through the early stages of making things work, they did not just lose time,
the arduous journey had the IT team struggling to explain to the CIO why the
project was running totally off target. Most were not technology challenges but
oversell to the CIO on what would work and how it would. Straddling the
physical and cloud world to offer a seamless and uniform experience to users
did pose a few challenges. I guess all clouds are not created equal as
competing solutions did offer to expectation.

The CIO called
for a review and experts from all over the world joined in to rescue the
situation. It was a one-sided affair with no real solution emerging to the
problem at hand. The CIO concluded with the pilot being disbanded. The
resultant credibility loss alienated the vendor in no small measure undoing a
lot of the good work that they had delivered in the past. It was almost like
the nursery rhyme in real world “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
could not put the vendor back on track again”.

I guess when it
comes to hybrid, cars work and have achieved a maturity level that brings
consumer confidence; with clouds I guess there are still challenges to overcome
and technology to reach stability and interoperability. Until then stay
cautious and don’t bet on everything to work the way it did in a pure cloud or
in-house model. The user experience with hybrids can be a dampener on the
enthusiasm that vendors and system integrators want you to feel while they
experiment at your cost.

P.S. it would
appear that the next wave promises Autonomic Computing, anyone game ?